The greatest train journey on Earth

Photo: Alamy

The Trans-Siberian is more than just a railway. It’s a journey into the psyche of modern Russia; a triumph of engineering; a movable feast through the largest – and, perhaps, most mysterious – nation on Earth

Crossing seven time zones, between Moscow and Vladivostok, the 5,772-mile train track blazes a trail through some of the bleakest and most beautiful landscapes on Earth.

In an epoch of low-cost air fares, the world's longest railway continues to exert a hold over travellers; it still tops bucket lists, still pulls in the tourists. It also remains a lifeline for millions of Russians.

Completed in October 1916 – exactly 100 years ago – the Trans-Siberian Railway helped shape the Russia we know today, though its influence can be felt much further afield, not least in Japan, China and Europe.

Winston Churchill famously described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” – words that still, perhaps, ring true today. A journey aboard the Trans-Siberian won’t necessarily solve that riddle, but it will certainly help make sense of this furtive nation.

Welcome aboard.

The Trans-Siberian Express rattles through a tunnel. Alamy

No railway has captured the imagination quite like the Trans-Siberian, but how did this epic feat of engineering come into being?

Suggestions for a track linking Moscow with resource-rich Siberia and the Pacific coast were first made in the 1850s, but the financial and technical challenges deterred action for decades. Overseas investors expressed an interest in building the railway, but the Russian government was reluctant to allow outside interests to have a stake in such a strategic line.

It was not until Alexander III’s reign in the 1880s that the project took shape and construction began at both ends: Moscow and Vladivostok.

Construction began in 1891. Alamy

To save money, the specification was foolishly cut back: the foundations were narrowed, the layer of ballast decreased, lighter rails used and the number of sleepers per mile reduced. Smaller bridges were built of wood rather than iron or steel.

Construction proved a nightmare for the few qualified engineers. The lack of labour meant that soldiers and conscripts had to be brought in across the desolate taiga and the harsh climate hampered progress. Large rivers had to be bridged, and many areas were either waterlogged or iron-hard permafrost. Up to 90,000 men were employed in construction.

Before the railway around Lake Baikal was completed, trains were carried 60 miles on the ice-breaking train ferry SS Baikal. Built in 1897 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne by Armstrong Whitworth in kit form, it was transported in pieces and assembled on the lakeshore. Even when the Circum-Baikal Railway was completed in 1904, the Baikal was kept in reserve until it was destroyed during the Russian Civil War. A smaller sister ship survives as a museum piece in Irkutsk.

The railway placed a decisive role in the Second World War. Alamy

Initially the route was not all on Russian territory: the Chinese Eastern Railway was constructed to provide a shorter route to Vladivostok via Harbin, where Russian staff were based. Now known as the Trans-Manchurian line, it is still the route of a train from Moscow to Beijing. An all-Russian Trans-Siberian route was finally completed in October 1916.

The folly of building the railway on the cheap had became apparent during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, when the railway could not cope with the demands made upon it, and it was not until well into the Twenties that all the deficiencies were rectified and civil war damage repaired.

During the Second World War the railway played a vital role in supplying first the Axis Powers and then the Allies. For the first two years of the conflict, when the USSR claimed neutrality, the railway served as an essential link between Japan and Germany.

Electrification began in 1929, but wasn't completed until 2002. Alamy

As commodities from the Orient travelled towards Europe, Jews and those opposed to the Nazi regime were filing the other way to Vladivostok, where they boarded ships bound for the US.

The situation changed markedly in 1941 when Germany invaded the USSR. This prompted the Soviet Union to join forces with the Allies and block the Nazi’s access to the railway. The Trans-Siberian continued to play an important role in the war: it was used to carry supplies from the US to Allied Europe and to transport Soviet troops to the Japanese front during the Soviet-Japanese War of 1945.

After the war, the Trans-Siberian continued to be a vital trade link for the Soviet Union. And it remains relevant today: nearly one third of Russian exports travel on the line, not to mention tens of thousands of passengers.

The route of the Trans-Siberian

Part 1: Moscow to Irkutsk

After months of preparation and years of wondering what it must be like to board the Trans-Siberian, the moment when it finally came was so much better than I had expected.

There was the train itself – the Rossiya (Number 2) – brightly painted in the Russian national colours of blue, white and red, and looking magnificent in the late evening light on Platform 4 of Yaroslavsky station in Moscow.

There were the smartly uniformed provodnitsas (train attendants) standing territorially by their carriage doors while they scrutinised tickets. There were last-minute dashes to buy extra provisions (cold bottles of beer in my case); there were tearful hugs and protracted goodbyes.

And then, when all of us were safely on board, there was a blast of martial-style music as the guards on the platform gave a final cheer and a wave and the train slowly pulled away. In the carriage corridor there was a spontaneous round of applause. We had just begun the greatest train journey in the world.

We didn't get off to the greatest of starts, though. Getting rather too caught up in the drama of the departure, I opened a bottle of beer and, with Moscow's Stalinesque towers still in view, proceeded to spill half of it on the floor. Maria, our fierce-looking provodnitsa, gave me a withering look.

The Rossiya (Number 2) is painted in the Russian national colours. Alamy

Having been slightly apprehensive about what our four-bed, second-class compartment would be like, we were pleasantly surprised. It was clean (and thanks to Maria's daily vacuuming it remained that way). It was also cosy, but the bunks were wide and long enough (my 6ft 2in son did not complain). There were fresh sheets and blankets and a small table on which we could tuck into our supplies – bread and peanut butter, pot noodles and the daily meals that were provided in polystyrene containers (typically buckwheat and meat; pork and peas; teeth-ruiningly sweet wafers).

I could happily have curled up with Anna Karenina and not emerged until we arrived in Irkutsk four nights and five time zones later. But there was so much to see. For someone so attuned to the visual harshness of urban life, it was a balm to stand in the corridor watching the endlessly green sweep of the Russian countryside passing by.

"There was applause. We had just begun the greatest train journey in the world."

The corridor – and in particular the all-important samovar dispensing boiling water at the end of it – was the place to socialise with our fellow travellers, which comprised a mixture of foreigners (some Britons, Germans, French, Japanese) and plenty of Russians. One of the great things about this journey is that it's not exclusively aimed at tourists; the Trans-Siberian is a regular working train used by ordinary Russians.

We shared many of the early scenic pleasures with Alexander, a kindly train engineer from Kolomna, just south of Moscow, who was travelling to Barabinsk for a few days' work. On the second evening of the trip, as we pulled away from Perm, we hit a glorious stretch incorporating streams, dramatic rock faces and beautiful forests, all bathed in the last of the day's sun.

"This is the real Russia," exclaimed Alexander, beating his breast. "I love this country; it is wonderful – also for me."

Passengers pass the time playing cards. Alamy

I enjoyed encounters with fellow passengers enormously but I could always retreat back into the sanctuary of our compartment for some quiet time. The slender Japanese couple we befriended further down the corridor had less room for manoeuvre: they shared a compartment with two larger than life Russians, one of whom spent the entire journey wandering around in his boxer shorts. "A very interesting cultural exchange," was how they termed the invitation to join their room-mates for a vodka-fuelled breakfast every morning at 9am. A French couple in a similar arrangement quietly upgraded to a two-bed, first-class cabin.

It sometimes felt frustrating not being able to experience more of the vast country we were passing through. But while we may not have been getting out and into Russia, Russia came to us in the form of the constantly changing cast of passengers – and the hawkers and babushkas that greeted us at every station. They sold everything from woollen shawls and huge cuddly toys to pieces of smoked fish.

"One of the great things about this journey is that it is not exclusively aimed at tourists."

In an animated exchange in the restaurant car towards the end of our third evening, a Russian army officer heading home to Vladivostok was insisting that his country's ice hockey team was the best in the world – a claim hotly contested by Shayna, an equally passionate ice hockey fan from Canada.

Like us, Shayna and her boyfriend Hans were taking the Trans-Siberian to Irkutsk and then taking the Trans-Mongolian to Ulan Bator and Beijing. But Beijing still felt a long way off as our train – at that point somewhere between Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk – trundled through a spectacular red Siberian sunset on its long passage east.
Not long afterwards the lights in the restaurant car were dimmed and the music – let's just call it Russian pop – was turned up. It was disco night on the Trans-Siberian.

There was some good-hearted jigging, an attempt at forming a snake and some rather indiscreet importuning of the Western ladies by inebriated Russian officers whose intentions, it can confidently be said, were not entirely honourable.

A young Russian by the name of Vladimir began showing just a little too much interest in my 16-year-old daughter and I decided it was time for us to retreat to our compartment.

Hawkers sell dried fish on the platform. Alamy

When we thought about this trip in London – and especially the four-night 3,222-mile stretch from Moscow to Irkutsk – we imagined it would go on forever and that we would easily get bored. At times our children were bored – endless silver birches weren't really their thing and there were few fellow teenagers – so they resorted to their books and iPods.

But for my wife and I the time flew by. There was the scenery – beautiful pine forests, meadows filled with wild purple flowers, the lovely hills surrounding Krasnoyarsk. There was the simple excitement of arriving at places like Nizhny Novgorod and wondering what they were like. There were also the quirky things you saw along the way: a woman dressed in her Sunday best in a yard full of geese; cargo trains bearing tanks and military vehicles; tantalising glimpses of gold-plated onion domes. And there was space: the sheer, vast space of Russia. Mental space.

"The lights were dimmed and the music turned up. It was disco night."

As our third day drew to a close, many of us due to get out at Irkutsk the next morning were almost sad not to be going all the way to Vladivostok (by now only another three nights away). We had got rather used to the rhythms and rituals of the day, the gatherings by the samovar, the chats at the corridor windows, the trips to the restaurant car. We'd got used to the bizarre way in which, no matter how many time zones you cross, Russian trains always run to Moscow time. And we had got used to the regular tickings-off we received from Maria – she once shouted at one of the German travellers for having spent more than five minutes in the communal bathroom (containing a large sink but no shower).

Four nights on board suddenly didn't seem like long enough. I was only on page 30 of Anna Karenina.

A glorious sunset over Siberia. Alamy

Part 2: Irkutsk-Vladivostok

The Trans-Siberian Railway was constructed simultaneously from east and west. The lines met at Irkutsk. Before trains could steam round Lake Baikal, passengers made the crossing by ferry. Today the Trans-Siberian tiptoes up the lake’s south-west shore, beside the satin-surfaced water on a little-used spur line.

It is a weird place. The lake is one of the biggest in the world, easily the oldest and the deepest – it is more than a mile to the bottom. It holds a fifth of the fresh water on the planet, enough, someone calculated, to meet the globe's demands for 40 years.

The water is highly oxygenated and well over half the species that inhabit it are unique. Among them are freshwater seals and a type of crab that devours everything organic, which accounts for the lake's vodka clarity. Who knows? The crabs may even have eaten the locomotive that fell into Lake Baikal during the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War when tracks were laid across the ice.

One night further east on the Trans-Siberian Railway is Ulan Ude, close to the Mongolian border and capital of the Buryat Republic, home to the largest of Siberia's ethnic groups. This is a land so remote it makes New Zealand seem like a metropolis. Within it are two atolls of religion, one Buddhist, one Christian, both survivors of years of ruthless intolerance. The Datsan monastery at Ivolginsk is the only one left of scores that were once dotted across the steppe.

Ice begins to form on Lake Baikal. Alamy

Built in 1946, its lemon pagodas rise, with curling eaves, from an immense cow pasture. For those who associate Buddhism with the tropics there are incongruities: I watched monks in magenta robes scurry from Russian cottages; prayer flags flutter from fir trees and grinning statues of Siberian tigers guard the temple. Inside, the scarlet silks and gilded serpents were scented by smouldering juniper wood and illuminated by butter candles.

That afternoon came the Christians. A choir of Old Believers, bundled into the high necks and long sleeves of their richly coloured traditional costume, sang hymns for us in sinewed harmony. We had been taken by bus to the village of Tarbagatay, where the ancestors of these Christian dissenters fetched up in the 18th century. Expelled by Catherine the Great, they trekked the 3,500 miles from Moscow.

"This is a land so remote it makes New Zealand seem like a metropolis."

Their apostasy was to ignore a new Orthodox liturgy. Nearly 200 years later, under Stalin, their persecution began all over again. Churches were destroyed and their worship driven underground. Older villagers remember only ever praying in the dark. Today the Old Believers are among some 20 groups, and the only one from Russia listed by Unesco under the category "Living Human Treasures".

Back on the train the interminable forest began to withdraw. On either side grassland rolled away to infinity. We had reached Russia's Far East, within a few hundred miles of Japan, closer still to North Korea and China, yet we arrived in a totally European city. It was as if all those miles and banging nights had been an illusion.

A provodnitsa prods at the ice forming beneath a carriage. Alamy

Vladivostok city centre, packed with elegant turn-of-the-century buildings, is regularly used as a European backdrop by oriental film-makers. The previous week, for a Chinese movie, it had been 1940s Hamburg.

There was a zest about the place not shared by the Siberian cities. Pop music jangled from open windows; there were ice-cream sellers on the pavements, outdoor cafés and trees shading pedestrian streets. But tour guides march to an incessant drum. They neither wander nor sit. And in Vladivostok, which until 1990 was closed to foreigners, they seemed unsure about what exactly they should be showing.

"It was as if all those miles and banging nights had been an illusion."

At the city's main museum we did two floors of indigenous people and stuffed fauna but not the third, which is devoted to the Communist years. "Let's go down," said the guide. "The Soviet period is not so interesting." We saw the Pacific Fleet from a distance and the memorial to the thousands of its members who lost their lives in the Second World War.

We filed through a submarine – another museum – and drove past Yul Brynner's birthplace. His family business was the Far Eastern Shipping Company on Aleutskaya Street.

And then it was over. At the airport a policeman looked suspiciously at our one-way tickets for the nine-hour flight back to Moscow. "How did you come here?" he asked. "By train," said someone, to which he just shrugged and let us through.

The sun abandons Vladivostok for another day. Alamy

Top 10: Highlights along the Trans-Siberian Express

1. Moscow

Moscow is certainly worth lingering in for a few days before you hop aboard the Trans-Siberian. The Russian capital isn't the prettiest city you'll visit, but it's packed with great sights: the Kremlin, St Basil’s Cathedral and the Bolshoi are amongst the highlights – and lest we forget the city’s lavish metro stations.

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. AP/Fotolia

2. The scenery

There's no better way to get a sense of the world's largest country than aboard the Trans-Siberian Express, which wends its way through beautiful pine and larch forests, meadows filled with flowers, rolling hills, rugged mountains, gilded churches, Siberian sunsets and, admittedly, the odd industrial eye-sore.

The Trans-Siberian Express winds through verdant scenery. Alamy

3. The trains

The locomotives that ply the Trans-Siberian Railway are often things of beauty. Among the public trains running between Moscow and Vladivostok is the Rossiya (Number 2), a wonderful piece of work, brightly painted in the Russian national colours of blue, white and red. For something truly stunning, splash out on a ticket aboard the privately-run Golden Eagle.

The trains themselves are things of beauty. Alamy

4. The provodnitsas

The Soviet Union may be long gone but some things never change, including the provodnitsa community of mainly older Russian women who each take charge of individual compartments on the train and ensure that they remain clean, well-stocked and that there is always boiling water to be had from the samovar at the end of the corridor. The provodnitsa's default mode is stern, but somewhere deep within is a smile.

Occasionally its possible to coax a smile from the provodnistas. Alamy

5. The people

The Trans-Siberian is a regular working train used by ordinary Russians, as well as tourists. It is not uncommon to be invited into fellow travellers' compartments at 9am for vodka-fuelled breakfasts and hearty discussions. The further the train gets from Europe, the more Asiatic the features of your fellow travellers. There are also, of course, lots of other interesting tourists from Europe, America and – not surprisingly given the end destination – Japan.

Girls peer from the window of the Trans-Siberian Express. Alamy

6. Yekaterinburg

An essential stopping off point for anyone with an interest in history; for it was here in July 1918 that the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, and his family were murdered by their Bolshevik captors. A church marks the spot.

Yekaterinburg is an essential stop if you like history. AP/Fotolia

7. Tobolsk

You’re unlikely to encounter many tourists in Tobolsk – few passengers get off the train here – but those who do are rewarded for their curiosity by one of the most beautiful kremlins in Russia. This historic city is also where Dostoevsky and Nicholas II passed through during their detentions in Siberia.

The kremlin at Tobolsk is one of Siberia's finest. AP/Fotolia

8. Lake Baikal

The deepest lake in the world certainly warrants a detour. If it’s summertime take a restorative dip in the crystalline waters and if it’s winter take a walk on the frozen surface – or try your hand at ice fishing. If you’re not fed up with train, there’s also the scenic Circumbaikal Railway, which takes passengers around the lake.

It's possible to drive on Lake Baikal in the winter. AP/Fotolia

9. Krasnoyarsk

Described by the author, Anton Chekhov, as the most beautiful city in Siberia, Krasnoyarsk is certainly worth disembarking for. While away a day or two exploring its museums and embellished timber mansions (a particular feature of Siberia); take yourself off to the nearby Stolby Nature Reserve; and go for a walk up the Yenisei River.

Krasnoyarsk is a gateway to Stolby Nature Reserve. AP/Fotolia

10. Vladivostok

The end of the line, Vladivostok might be closer to North Korea than Europe, but the city has a decidedly European feel. Framed by rugged mountains, the city is packed with elegant turn-of-the-century buildings and is regularly used as a “European” backdrop by oriental film-makers. Stay and admire the city and reward yourself for completing the longest railway journey on Earth.

The Trans-Siberian arrives at Vladivostok. Alamy

How to do the Trans-Siberian Express

1. Do it yourself

It’s entirely possible to organise a trip on the Trans-Siberian Express under your own steam by turning up at Moscow’s Yaroslavsky station, joining the queue and buying a ticket from the kiosk. Sounds straightforward, but it’s not: queues are long, availability is often limited and the ticket vendors rarely speak English.

If you do choose this option, which is the cheapest way of travelling, get a Russian-speaking friend to write on a piece of paper exactly what ticket you want to buy, detailing the time, date, destination and class. Alternatively, use a specialist agent such as Real Russia (020 7100 7370; realrussia.co.uk) to make the reservations for you.

2. Get a package deal

Many tourists prefer the simplicity of booking an all-inclusive package from travel companies as Audley Travel (01993 838200; audleytravel.com), Railbookers (020 3327 1562; railbookers.com) or Regent Holidays (020 3553 3240; regent-holidays.co.uk). They do the hard work for you.